Nexus 5 Teardown Reveals Modular Design and Minimal Glue

As expected, iFixit has gotten a hold of the Nexus 5 and tore it down to its bare bottom. What the folks found was an overall very easy device to tear down and put back together. The Nexus 5 barely uses any glue on the inside (unlike the iPad air, which is quite the sticky situation), and it also uses an overall modular design, which means that it’s fairly easy to replace individual parts if they ever go bad.

Furthermore, the Nexus 5 uses standardized screws, so there’s no need to hunt down special tools to get the job done. However, the downside that iFixit found was that the LCD and the front glass are fused to the display frame, making screen repairs practically impossible for DIYers.

iFixit gave the Nexus 5 a repairability score of 8/10, which is the complete opposite of the iPad air’s 2/10 score from last week. Then again, Apple products are notorious for being very difficult to take apart and repair, while Android devices have mostly received praise for easy repairability when it comes to replacing internal hardware.

As for other secrets, there really aren’t any that we don’t already know. Thanks to leaks in the past, we know what’s on the inside of the device, such as quad-core, 2.3 GHz Snapdragon 800 processor and 2GB of RAM, as well as an 8MP rear camera with a 1.3MP front-facing camera. There’s also Bluetooth 4.0, NFC and 802.11ac wireless capabilities.

And of course, the Nexus 5 comes with the new Android 4.4 KitKat operating system, with a ton of new features. Obviously, iFixit couldn’t tear that apart, because it’s impossible to do, physically, but the hardware is certainly only half the story. The Nexus 5 is available in both black and white versions and comes in 16GB and 32GB variants for $349 and $399, respectively.

Currently, the phone is on back-order for several weeks in the Google Play store, and that’s the only place you can buy the device for now. Google announced, though, that the Nexus 5 will come to several retailers in the future, including Amazon and Best Buy.